Some people really are crazy, but then, “crazy” is a relative term. Does it apply to someone who feels he might spin off into outer space and never be able to get back down to Earth? Or is it only crazy when you have to cling to the nearest table…
The 1995 film Friday is best remembered as the film that brought actor Chris Tucker to audiences’ attention. A modest hit, it would seem an odd choice for a sequel, but Ice Cube — who co-wrote the original with DJ Pooh, as well as produced and starred — is back…
You hope for Dorothy Lamour, reclining against a palm tree in her sarong, when you hear the title The Hurricane. Instead, you get well more than two hours of Denzel Washington huddled in a cell. In the poster art, Washington glowers out, one bandaged fist cocked for a right to…
Sixty years after Walt Disney’s original plans to expand on the original Fantasia, Disney has finally gotten around to making new musical segments for a reprise of the film’s classical-music-cum-animation concept. Cleverly timed and titled to open on the first day of the new millennium — and, regardless of any…
When Paul Thomas Anderson’s second feature, Boogie Nights, was released in 1997, critics and film industry types fell over themselves to designate Anderson the next big thing, an auteur in the footsteps of Scorsese and Coppola. His film turned Mark Wahlberg from a has-been underwear model and rapper into a…
Let’s hear it for sports movies! The most avid sports fan can occasionally be bored by lackluster games, but even the casual spectator can appreciate what the big screen can do for an athletic contest, even one played by actors rather than athletes: the closer-than-life close-ups, the dramatic use of…
Writer-director Anthony Minghella has chosen to follow up his Oscar-laden The English Patient with another literary adaptation — this time, of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. Highsmith is best known to film buffs as the author of Strangers on a Train, the basis for one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best…
Ah, what a miracle that Andy Kaufman was. So sublime his wit, so pioneering his spirit. Astonishing! A hero to be loved, adored and emulated by all artists and performers for the rest of eternity. An opener of doors; a smasher down of barriers; a glorious, luminous, intrepid spirit without…
The last half-decade has been very good to Jane Austen: Besides Ang Lee’s estimable 1995 version of Sense and Sensibility, we’ve been given film or TV adaptations of Emma, Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice, not to mention Clueless, Amy Heckerling’s remarkably apt updating of Emma. Now Miramax and the BBC…
I sincerely hope that Jodie Foster gets a chance to relax and unwind this holiday season, because the lady has obviously worked like a horse to instill her latest role with humanity and significance. As intrepid British widow Anna Leonowens, in the huge and poetic new Anna and the King,…
At first glance, Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother seems uncharacteristically grim for a filmmaker with such a demonic sense of humor. Within 10 minutes, the heroine’s 17-year-old son is hit and killed by a car, which propels her and the events of the film into motion. In the next…
Ride With the Devil
Directed by Ang Lee; with Skeet Ulrich, Tobey Maguire and Jewel.
Rated R.
The Cider House Rules
Directed by Lasse Hallström; with Tobey Maguire, Michael Caine and Charlize Theron.
Rated PG-13.
Tumbleweeds
Directed by Gavin O’Connor; with Janet McTeer and Kimberly J. Brown.
Rated PG-13.
Have you ever endured a relationship in which your partner beat you up mercilessly, just so they could “heal” you and play the redeemer later on? Granted, that’s a weird question and perhaps one better explored via Akbar and Jeff in Matt Groening’s Life in Hell strip, but it directly…
The legend “That Afternoon” appears onscreen, and then we see a car hurtle past us on a lonely desert road, hotly pursued by two Arizona Highway Patrol units. Behind the wheel, our hero Wade (Drew Pillsbury) sits with a stricken look on his face, plainly baffled at how he’s gotten…
Be forewarned: In the continuing quest to get people to pay attention to their films by any means necessary, the marketing wizards at Artisan Entertainment have been misrepresenting Felicia’s Journey to an even greater extent than the Shooting Gallery did The Minus Man (also distributed by Artisan). No doubt hoping…
At the beginning of Spanish Fly, Zoe, the heroine, meets Antonio, who’s both Spanish and fly. Zoe’s an American writer staying in Madrid to research a book on machismo. Antonio, a blocked writer himself and a not-at-all-blocked womanizer, is her interpreter. They start bickering at once, so we know they’re…
The last time Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in an apocalypse-themed action movie with a Guns n’ Roses theme song was in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the biggest and loudest action movie that had thus far ever been seen. Since that time, he’s produced one bona fide balls-to-the-wall action flick (True Lies),…
The wide-screen debut of Pokémon has two subtitles: The First Movie, which implies, with almost tragic inevitability, the promise of a Second and a Third and so on, stretching out into the infinite reaches of posterity; and Mewtwo Strikes Back, which implies almost nothing, presumably even to those immersed in…
How do you make a sequel to a nearly perfect film? Toy Story, the 1995 hit from Disney and Pixar, was not only the first fully computer-animated feature; it was also as brilliantly written and directed a film as any of the classic Disney releases. Pixar did nearly everything right…
“The spectre is known at all the country firesides by the name of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow,” writes Washington Irving in his original fantasy. Thanks in large part to the silly, watered-down fun of the animated Disney version, the horseman and his victim, the gangling and gallant Ichabod…
